Palmer, A. Mitchell
Palmer, Alexander Mitchell
ACHIEVEMENTS: US attorney general and Congressman.
NICKNAME/ALIAS: known as A. Mitchell.
DATE AND PLACE OF BIRTH: 4 May 1872, Luzerne County, Pennsylvania.
DATE/PLACE OF DEATH/AGE AT DEATH:. 11 May 1936, Washington, D.C., aged 64.
DISCIPLINE: Lawyer and politician.
FIELD: US politics.
LANGUAGE: English.
PARENTS: Father, Samuel Bernard Palmer, mother, Caroline Albert.
SIBLINGS:
SPOUSE: First, Roberta Bartlett Dixon, second Margaret Fallon Burrall.
CHILDREN: 1.
EDUCATION: Swarthmore College.
MAJOR WORK:
LIFE AND TIMES: A. Mitchell Palmer was born into a Quaker family in Pennsylvania that had long been active in local Democratic Party politics. Following his graduation from Swarthmore College in 1891, he returned to Pennsylvania and worked as an attorney in Monroe County. In 1898 he married Roverta Bartlett Dixon, whose father was then president of the local bank.
By 1908 Palmer had been elected to Congress by the largest majority in his districts history. Once in Congress, Palmer rose rapidly through the ranks and quickly became an important member of the Pennsylvania Democratic Party. He was elected to Pennsylvania’s Democratic National Committee in 1912, and he was soon appointed to the important Ways and Means Committee.
Palmer was the floor leader at the 1912 Democratic National Convention, at which Woodrow Wilson* was nominated Democratic Presidential candidate. Wilson and Palmer were both elected that year. Wilson, in recognition of Palmer’s political abilities and loyalty, offered Palmer a cabinet position as secretary of war. Palmer declined the position because of his Quaker beliefs.
Wilson did however continue to recognize Palmer as an important political ally in Congress and helped Palmer win the chairmanship of the Executive Committee of the Democratic National Committee.
Palmer embraced the progressive and reform measures of the day. He introduced measures to protect child labor, introduced legislation supporting the female vote, and always voted in support of labor.
In 1914 Palmer ran for a US Senate seat and lost to Boies Penrose, most likely because while in Congress he had helped write the Underwood Tariff Bill that placed most iron and steel on the tariff-free list, a move that workers believed, and Penrose argued, would lead to more competition and a loss of American jobs. After losing the election, Palmer returned to private practise, but was soon appointed by President Wilson to a government position.
In 1919 Palmer was appointed attorney general, a post he held until 1921. While the war was over when Palmer became attorney general, the peace treaty had not yet been signed. Palmer used this technicality to exercise wartime power to control post-war inflation, labor unrest, and threats from radicals in the United States.
Palmer, who had always been considered a friend to organized labor, suddenly made himself the enemy when he ordered injunctions against labor leaders, forcing them to withdraw strike calls. Palmer claimed the injunctions were necessary to stop a worldwide communist conspiracy from taking over in the US.
Much of Palmer’s information about radical and communist activity was coming from his special assistant, J. Edgar Hoover. Hoover had been charged with watching and interpreting the radical movement in the US. In 1919 he reported that radicals posed a dangerous threat, arguing that communists in the U.S. were part of a worldwide conspiracy to overthrow all governments, and as such must be suppressed.
Much of what happened next is now known as the Palmer Raids. Palmer used the war time Espionage Act (1917) and Sedition Act (1919) to arrest and deport any alien or immigrant who was against the war, believed in socialism, communism, or anarchism, was a member of the IWW (Industrial Workers of the World) or was in any way associated with any radical organization, even owning radical literature was enough to be arrested and deported as an alien enemy.
Palmer, working with the Labor Department, under whose jurisdiction the deportations were carried out, made the first of his raids against the Union of Russian Workers on 7 November 1919, the second anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution.
The organization, many of whose members were anarchists, was largely an educational and social association. Raids took place in urban areas across the country, arrests were made often without warrants, U.S. citizens were picked up and had to prove their citizenship, and many were held without bail for months at a time. The Palmer Raids, in which over 10,000 people were arrested and held for deportation, remain one of greatest violations of civil liberties in U.S. history.
Less than two months after the raids 274 people were deported to Russia, including anarchists Goldman* and Berkman*, both of whom had been in prison since 1917 for their agitation against forced conscription and U.S. involvement in the war.
In January 1920 another 6,000 people were arrested in a second round of raids.
Palmer, once considered a strong contender for the 1920 presidential election, began to lose public support for his actions. A number of prominent and respected judges and law professors spoke out against his actions. This, coupled with organized labor’s strong opposition to him following his suppression of strikes in 1919, forced Democrat leaders to pass Palmer over for nomination in 1920.
Palmer quickly lost prominence in the Democrat Party, some even arguing that he had created the Red Scare and the Palmer raids in an effort to win the presidential nomination.
Palmer remained partially active, helping Franklin D. Roosevelt* organize his 1932 presidential campaign, and was working on the 1936 campaign when he died.
ASSESSMENT: A. Mitchell Palmer, once a rising star of the Woodrow Wilson’s progressive and reform government, is associated today with one of the US’s greatest violations of civil liberties, the result of the “Red Scare,” a country-wide fear of communist revolution
EXTRA CONNECTIONS: None
ONELINER: Mitchell Palmer, ‘Red Scare” US Attorney General
BIBLIOGRAPHY:
Coben, Stanley, A Mitchell Palmer: Politician. New York: Columbia University Press, 1963.
ANB
Murray, Robert, Red Scare: A Study in National Hysteria, 1919-1920. New York: McGraw Hill, 1964.